As the amount of solid waste generated in the United States increases and landfill capacity diminishes, efficient recycling becomes of critical importance. In many communities, recyclable waste amounts to 40% of the total waste collected and yet is not allowed in landfills but must be transported to separate recycling facilities
Despite the magnitude of the recycling problem, the economics of waste collection impose severe limits on the additional cost that may be tolerated in dealing with recyclable materials. Waste collection is characterized by frequent collection of small amounts of waste from many decentralized generators, typically homes, for removal to a remote disposal site. A high level of service, as expected by consumers, is possible largely because of the evolutionary optimization of waste handling methods: equipment and labor, over the years, have been carefully matched to task at hand.
The allocation of waste removal equipment has been improved by the use of large trucks having compaction capabilities extending their effective range and capacity between unloadings. Increased range and capacity eliminates unnecessary and costly trips between the customer/generators and the disposal site. The labor needed to collect waste has been minimized by designing these trucks for efficient operation by two or three man teams. Frequently, the trucks will include specialized hoists to lift trash containers into the truck. Such hoists are controlled from curbside, reducing wasted motion in the collection cycle.
A principle additional cost to the recycling of waste is the separation of the waste types. Although various procedures have been proposed for the separation of waste types at the disposal site, currently, the most cost effective separation method is to have recyclable waste separated by the customer/generator and to maintain that separation throughout the waste collection process.
The difficulty of maintaining a number of separated waste streams is monumental. The straightforward approach, of having separate vehicles and collection teams for each waste stream, increases the total cost of waste collection by the number of separate collections. The cost is increased further by the fact that with such separate collections, the average waste volume collected by each collection team is a smaller percentage of the waste generated by each household. Accordingly, the efficiencies of waste collection drop markedly.